Pleasant, Indiana winter scenery was skipping past us. There was clean, light snow on the fields through which stuck brown cornstalks, in those great, even patterns which so intriguingly alter as you dash past. There were frozen brooks with ice-encased willows bent over them; there were lots of agreeable looking farmhouses and farm people Fording to and from little crossroads towns which looked idyllic, rather, whatever the facts may be.
“Has Sinclair Lewis spoiled this sort of landscape for you?” Doris asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind.
“I’m damned if he has for me!” I said sincerely.
She brought her small hands together. “Good! Nor has he for me. Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather’s people when we’re whistling through tank towns.”
“So do I,” I said, agreeing again. “They’re there; they’re hearing the whistle. You meet ’em. You ever been in a tank town?”
“When I was a child, I lived in one,” she told me; “when father was serving his second term in the ‘long house’ at Leavenworth.”
She might have said his second term in the House of Congress, from the way she spoke. No shame in it at all. Yet it brought me back to business. For a minute she had been just a girl, mighty pretty and bright and pleasant and with tastes and distastes, both, which I liked.
She’d known about Erasmus and Holbein when we talked at the ball, you remember; now she knew about the same books I’d been reading. Likely she’d dipped into “This Freedom” too, in order to help herself decide whether, after marriage, she should drop business for the sake of the children or should keep right on to help husband.
Probably, in Chicago, she’d seen “Lightnin’” and “The Hairy Ape” and heard Galli-Curci and Chaliapin. Of course she had. A crook can’t be crooking all the time; she’s at the normal round most of it. But I’d never realized that till I took a little leisure to think it over. Now when you say a person’s a counterfeiter, for instance, naturally you think of him or her, or both of them, crouching somewhere covertly together, printing off their money and then slipping out, with many glances around, to convert it into groceries and some of our ordinary authorized currency. But actually, very little of their time may be spent so. Most of it goes into just living,—maybe looking at movies, at dance halls or driving around; or at the Art Institute, a good play or two, the opera, and maybe a lecture also, according to taste. I’ve heard of a gerver, lately, who even made it a habit to attend Sunday-evening club talks; and he was crazy over Burton Holmes.
So here was a girl like any other I knew, only quite some little quicker and pleasanter and better looking, with nothing really strange about her except her proclivity for passing out the bank notes father gave her. She knew it was wrong, of course, so very wrong that, for it, she ought to be shut in the “long house” at Leavenworth herself, serving her own long term.